


Anchor

by wowbright



Series: Glee Season 6 Episode Reactions [1]
Category: Glee
Genre: Depression, Dr. Joyce (OC), Episode Reaction, Episode Related, Episode: s06e01, Episode: s06e01 Loser Like Me, Gay Bar, Gen, Loser Like Me, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Psychotherapy, Recovery, Romantic Friendship, Suicidal Thoughts, scandals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 20:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3181403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wowbright/pseuds/wowbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine learns how to be comfortable in his own skin. Being around Dave helps. (Takes place in the interstices of 6.01, before Blaine and Dave start dating.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anchor

**Author's Note:**

> Also [on tumblr](http://wowbright.tumblr.com/post/108233496600/fic-anchor-blaine-dave-pg-13).

Blaine knew he shouldn’t dwell on the past, but he couldn’t help it. That’s where his brain went, when it was working at all: replaying old scenes on endless loop. He watched them, paused them, focused in on the errors  – the countless stupid things he said, the endless inventory of things he carelessly didn’t do. He wished he was Artie and could just edit them out, rearranging the good bits into a whole new film of his life. A different story, with an entirely happy ending and absolutely no arguments about toothpaste.Toothpaste.

_Toothpaste?_

Why had he complained about the toothpaste? Why had he taken every inconsiderate thing that Kurt did so personally? Why hadn’t he just hung up an extra towel, one that was all his own?

Of course, Kurt probably would have complained about it upsetting the visual balance of the bathroom and tossed it in the hamper.

Kurt could be so pigheaded.

He could be so _awful_.

_A flash of Kurt’s face, contorted into forced calm that rainy night at the restaurant. Pain is twitching under the angry line of Kurt’s mouth – that pain that is always there, under everything that Blaine has tried so hard and in so many ways to alleviate. Maybe he can find a way now. Maybe if he reached out, if he called Kurt’s bluff, if he –_

“Blaine.”

Blaine heard her voice, but he couldn’t seem to raise his head. He didn’t want to raise his head. Because if he moved he would notice the things around him, and Kurt’s face would fade away.

“Blaine, can you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I just wanted to make him happy. Why couldn’t I?”

The image faded. Blaine became aware of the sunlight on his lap. It made the mustard yellow of his pants look almost white.

“We can’t make other people happy. How a person feels is something that happens inside of them.”

“But I did sometimes. When we first met, he was so sad. We had coffee and he couldn’t stop crying. But I sang for him and I gave him my phone number and he smiled.” Blaine looked up at Dr. Joyce. She was pretty, with curly blonde hair that caught the light.

She smiled at him. “That’s an interesting way to meet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a serenade on a first date before.”

Blaine chuckled. Strange that he was capable of laughter, even when life was anything but light. “It wasn’t a date. He was at my school, and my glee club was performing. Kurt just kind of – he pulls focus. The song ended up being for him because he was there. There’s something in him that – it just makes you want to move mountains for him, you know?”

“Moving mountains is difficult work. I’m not sure anyone’s ever managed it.”

“It felt like I had, for a while though. He was still sad a lot when we first started dating, but then the summer came and it was – he was happy. He smiled all the time. And I felt … It felt good to be a part of that.”

“Were you the only reason he was happy? Or were there other things going on, too?”

“I think it helped that he didn’t have to worry about school or glee club. Because as soon as we went back it was –”

Dr. Joyce looked at him with the patience of an angel, just waiting for him to speak. He wished Kurt would’ve waited like that sometimes.

“It started to get hard again. Not all the time. But it wasn’t as easy as the summer.”

“So it sounds to me like there were a lot of things going on. That Kurt could be happy or sad without it being related to you.”

“I guess, but – there still has to be a way I can make him happier, right? Because I sure could make him angry. I can’t even go to the only gay bar in town because it’s where we had our first big fight – and even though we went there other times, too, it’s like … All I can remember is the bad stuff. I tried going last month just to get out of the house but just being in the parking lot, I could hear Kurt yelling at me for screwing things up – and he was right, the whole thing was my fault – and of course I got to thinking about everything else that was my fault and –”

He didn’t realize the room was spinning until Dr. Joyce interrupted. “Blaine, I want you to remember to breathe. Let’s do the breathing exercise.”

He looked at her, focused on her mouth as the anchor point in the spinning room as she counted out the beats for each breath.

“You know, Blaine, I admire you,” she said when they were done.

He must have misheard. “I’m sorry?”

“I admire you. You have a huge heart. It hurts you to see people in pain, and you want them to feel better. You have a lot of empathy, Blaine. That’s a gift.”

“I … um. Thank you?”

“What did we talk about with accepting compliments?”

“I mean, ‘Thank you.’” He looked up at her honest eyes, and the dam inside him broke. It did a lot these days. He took a Kleenex from the center of the coffee table and wiped his eyes. “It’s just … hard. Feeling so many things and not being able to fix them.”

“Well,” she said. “Maybe you can take that compassion you feel for other people and apply it to yourself. You’re as valuable as anyone else, Blaine.”

“I don’t – I don’t know how.”

She cocked her head to the side as if she’d just heard something important but couldn’t quite figure out what it was. “Have you been suicidal lately?”

He shrugged. “No. Not really. I mean –” It was hard to describe, this place where his mind had finally settled in the past few weeks. “I don’t want to die. I didn’t really want to that time I made a plan, either. I was just … testing it out. To see if it scared me as much as it should.”

“You did more than make a plan, Blaine.”

“I did less than carry it through. And it scared the crap out of me.”

“You have good survival skills.”

“And I’m not going to make another plan, because – sometimes I want to disappear, but I don’t … I don’t want to hurt myself. I want feel good again, and I can’t if I’m gone.” He reached for another Kleenex. “I want to love life again. I just don’t know how.”

Dr. Joyce set her clipboard on the side table and leaned toward him. “I think the first step is to be gentle with yourself. Give yourself as much love as you give to other people.”

“How do I do that? I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

“You’ve told me about making special breakfasts for Kurt, and about how you sometimes cook for Sam. Maybe you could make a special meal just for you. Do you think you could do that before our next visit?”

He knew he was physically capable of it, even if most days he didn’t feel like leaving his bedroom. He’d managed to get here, after all. “I guess.”

“And I do still think it would be helpful for you to have other gay friends here in Lima. If you’re not comfortable at the bar –”

“I want to be, though. I used to love Scandals.”

“Do you want to add going there to your list of goals?”

Blaine’s stomach lurched – half with terror, half with exhilaration. “Yes,” he said. “I want to have a space of my own.”

* * *

Blaine didn’t go to Scandals that week or the next. But when he finally did, he was ready. He took his mom’s car, which was so new it had no memories of Kurt attached to it. He parked at the opposite side of the lot from their old usual spot and took the longer walk to the door to avoid triggering any sense memories of being next to Kurt.

When the memories started to flood him anyway, he took a deep breath and silently told them, “Stop. I’m making room for new ones.”

He opened the door, flashed his ID to the bouncer, got his hand marked with an “X,” and walked past the B-O-Y sign toward the bar.

There were some familiar faces, but none he knew by name. No one he recognized from McKinley or Dalton. He half expected to see Sebastian here, had played over in his mind whether to be fickle or flirtatious with the boy who had almost blinded him. It frightened him a little that he couldn’t decide.

He should probably talk about that with Dr. Joyce.

In any case, there was no Sebastian here. Good. It was a sea of nameless faces, some of whom might eventually become his friends. He wasn’t going to worry about that tonight though. He was going to order a Coke, drink it slowly, make small talk if anyone started small talk with him, and leave. His only goal was to get through the evening without a panic attack.

A half hour later Blaine left Scandals with a smile on his face and three phone numbers he planned to never call. The men who had given them to him were all too old for him, and Blaine wasn’t exactly looking to date someone right now anyway.

He wanted to learn to love himself before trying to love anybody new.

* * *

The next time Blaine went to Scandals, he stayed a little longer. And the time after that, a little longer still, giving himself enough time to read the event signs plastered to the door and against the wall by the restrooms.

There were so many ways to enjoy being gay – Drag Night and Madonna night, Baz Luhrmann Night and Real Housewives of Atlanta Night – and all of them reminded him of Kurt.

But then he caught sight of the phrase “Country Bear Night.”

 _Country_ and _bears_?

There were few things in the world so opposite of Kurt and of what Blaine had been when he was with him.

Blaine jotted down the date into his phone and left Scandals smiling once again.

* * *

Blaine spent most of the five days preceding Country Bear Night preparing for it. It started after a morning shower, when his routine was to stand naked in front of the full length mirror and pluck any stray chest hairs that had started to grow since his last wax.

He had his tweezers grasped around the end of one and was just about to pull when he remembered, “Bears don’t wax.”

He let his razor lie idle that morning, as well, trying to ignore the odd itching sensation of letting the hair on his face grow – though it was impossible to ignore completely. He had never let it go this long except on days when he couldn’t get out of bed and was incapable of noticing anything but the pain throbbing inside his own heart.

Skipping a shave when he was cognizant of the world around him was a completely different experience. He kept rubbing his palm across the stubble, an array of tiny pinheads against his skin.

By the next evening, the pinheads had turned into quills – less sharp, more malleable. He accidentally missed the beginning of “My Cat From Hell” because he was distracted by his own image in the mirror, studying the shadow creeping across his jaw and above his lips now, trying to decide if he looked more like George Michael or the terrorist he’d been accused of being in Dalton’s hallowed halls.

He went to the department store the next day and charged a Western shirt and a pair of cowboy boots to his parents’ credit card, then wore them to his 3 o’clock coffee date with Sam.

“Who are you, even?” Sam said after Blaine had tapped him on the shoulder twice.

“I’m Blaine. It’s me, Blaine.”

Sam shook his head. “If you’re Blaine, why do you keep dressing up like you’re someone else?”

Blaine suddenly noticed that his toes were throbbing from the boots’ narrow fit, that the embroidery of his Western shirt crossed his nipples in the most irritating way, and that his beard – oh, God, it felt like hundreds of fire ants crawling out of his pores.

When he got home, he threw his new clothes in the giveaway pile and ran to the bathroom to shave.

He gazed at the mirror a long time after he was done, noticing the color of his eyes and the line of his nose and the shape of his small, plump lips.

He lifted his fingers to the mirror and traced his jaw. “Hi,” he said. “I missed you.”

* * *

Blaine went to Country Bear Night as himself: clean-shaven face, slicked-back hair, freshly plucked chest. He wore an oxford shirt and bowtie and sat at a small table by himself, sipping Coke and watching people dance.

Blaine might not be a bear, but that didn’t mean he didn’t like looking at them. Of course he liked looking at them: they were men, and Blaine liked men, their virility and strength, their scent of sweat and aftershave filling the air.

He was wondering if he should join the line dance when a long-forgotten, familiar face caught his eye.

Blaine had never anticipated this moment, so he wasn’t sure how to react. He sat nervously at his table as the dance continued, sometimes looking away at the other dancers and sometimes looking back at Dave who, if they happened to be looking at each other at the same moment, would flash a white smile in his direction.

When the dance ended, Dave grabbed a drink from the bar and sauntered over to his table. “Didn’t expect to see you around here. I thought I’d heard you and Kurt moved to New York.”

Blaine studiously avoided flinching at the name. He took a deep breath and gestured for Dave to sit. “I’m back in Lima.”

“Me, I never left,” Dave chuckled, more to himself than anything else. “Thought I’d want to, but Lima’s actually not bad when you know where to look. I’m taking classes at Rhodes State for now, maybe I’ll transfer later.”

“I’d always pictured you at a four-year,” Blaine said, realizing only as he said it that he’d ever let his idle thoughts wander to David Karofsky at all. “Kurt said you were really smart.” For some reason, Kurt’s name on his own lips didn’t make Blaine startle the way it did when other people said it.

“Being on the psych ward kind of fucked up my college applications process.” Dave shrugged one shoulder and kept smiling.

Blaine’s first instinct was to apologize, but he heard Dr. Joyce’s voice in his head. _I’ve noticed you spend a lot of time apologizing for things that aren’t your fault._ So instead he said, “That makes sense. It’s kind of how I ended up flunking out of NYADA. I wasn’t on a psych ward, but … maybe I should have been. Things might have gotten better faster if I had.”

“Really?” Genuine surprise flashed across Dave’s face. “You always seemed so happy to me, and perfect, and –” He stopped, looked down at his beer, took a slow swig. “I guess the insides don’t always match the outsides.”

“No,” Blaine said. “But I’m doing better now, mostly. I got a job coaching the glee club at my old school – Dalton, not McKinley – and I really like it. I feel useful there.”

“One foot in front of the other,” Dave said. They clinked their glasses.

It wasn’t until later in the evening that Dave asked the question that Blaine had been fearing, the one that Blaine had tried to answer before it could be asked just to avoid the discomfort of it, but somehow couldn’t manage.

“How’s Kurt?”

“We broke up.” Blaine squinted his eyes to ease the pain building up in them. “He broke up with me. That was kind of the trigger for …” Blaine lifted his hand from the table and circled it in the air. “Everything.”

Blaine didn’t know what he was expecting, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the look of honest disappointment – almost heartbreak – that spread across Dave’s face. Dave’s mouth dropped slightly open and stayed that way for a few moments, as if he was trying to speak but no sound came out. “But – I saw your proposal on YouTube. They had showings of it here at Scandals. … And I watched it sometimes at home, too. It made me feel good, to know that I hadn’t ruined his life for good.” He dropped his jaw to his hands and shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. He seemed so in love with you.”

Blaine shrugged. “He said he was. But I guess that wasn’t enough.”

Dave reached across the table, rubbed his hand against Blaine’s shoulder. It was solid and warm, the kind of weight that Blaine longed for in the sleepless hours of the night. “I’m sorry, Blaine. I really am.”

* * *

Blaine ended up telling Dave everything. He told him about the first time he met Kurt and about how he fell  in love without knowing it. That was his fundamental problem, really – that half the time he had no idea that he was feeling anything until suddenly he _acted_ on that feeling – and there it was, jumping out at him like the monster in some horror movie. It’s how he’d ended up cheating on Kurt, how he’d started and continued so many fights with him, how he’d hidden the truth about his body issues and about June for too long, how horrible words he didn’t even know he was capable of uttering would fly out of his mouth at inopportune times.

“You’re telling me,” Dave said. It was two weeks after their first meeting at Scandals. They were sitting on the hood of Dave’s car, watching for a meteorite shower over Garfield Park. “I’m the one who didn’t know I was gay until I kissed Kurt in the locker room. Talk about being a monster. I still have nightmares about that sometimes – being in the closet and doing awful things.”

“Really?”

“Not as much as I used to. It helps that Kurt forgave me.”

There was a flicker in the sky. They watched it streak downward in a bright line, then disappear.

“Most of my nightmares are about fighting with Kurt,” Blaine said. “Or about having to take a final exam for a class that I never attended. Both of which happened in real life, coincidentally.”

Dave leaned over into the cooler and pulled out two cans of Coke. He popped the tabs and handed one to Blaine. “Here’s to having new nightmares,” he said, raising his can in a toast. “It’s got to happen one day.”

* * *

Dave told Blaine everything, too. About how hard it was to get better after he’d fallen so far, but how second-nature it seems now. About his first sort-of-serious boyfriend, a jock from Bluffton College who was clean-cut and smelled awesome, but was too laid up with religious guilt for anything to last.

He talked about the more distant past, too – about figuring out that he was gay and the unwilling role that Kurt played in that, about falling hard for someone for the very first time.

“Were you in love with him?” Blaine asked. They were on their third refill at the Lima Bean, hadn’t left their tiny corner table for hours except to top their drinks.

Dave took a slow sip and looked out the window. “I don’t know. But whenever I was around him, I felt real. Kurt was the only person who’d ever made me feel that way.”

Blaine traced his finger over the handle of his mug. “I know what you mean.”

* * *

Kurt was the start of what they had in common, but he wasn’t the only thing. They both loved being around other people: loved to make them smile, and to make them forget there was anything in life not to smile about. They spent entire rainy weekends doing nothing but sitting on the couch and flipping back and forth between games on ESPN and NBC Sports.

They both knew what it was like to have one end of a belt around your throat, and the other looped around the rafters.

“Have I ever thanked you for trying to help me?” Dave said. It was early in the evening; the music at Scandals was still quiet enough to carry on a meandering conversation. “I mean, way back then? When you showed up at McKinley with Kurt?”

Blaine ducked his head and laughed. “I wasn’t very effective.”

Dave reached across their tiny table and rested his hand on Blaine’s wrist. “You were more effective than you knew. I know I didn’t act that way, but … it meant something to me.”

The weight of Dave’s fingers made Blaine conscious of his own pulse. He blushed and forgot every lesson Dr. Joyce had tried to teach him about accepting compliments. “Something like, ‘Wow, I’ve finally met someone who’s even pushier than Kurt?’”

“Maybe a little bit of that, at first.” Dave smiled and shook his head. “But after I stopped seeing red … I don’t know. It gave me hope, too. I never … Obviously I have nothing against guys you can just tell are gay, because some of them are pretty hot and otherwise I might never have known who to ask on a date when I first came out, but … Up until then, I’d only thought there was one way to be gay, and that was to be like Kurt. And obviously I wasn’t like Kurt, so it was just … I didn’t know where I fit. But then you showed up and I looked at you and was like, ‘He doesn’t even look gay.’”

“I take offense at that.” Blaine gave a little wink and took a sip of Coke through his straw.

Dave nudged Blaine’s foot under the table. “I had, like, zero gaydar back then. You look gay to me now, obviously.”

“I would hope so.”

Dave withdrew his hand and wrapped it around his glass. “What I’m trying to say is, you didn’t look like I thought gay was _supposed_ to look like. And sometimes I’d look at myself in the mirror and think about that. How what you expect to be true and what’s actually true can be two different things.”

Blaine wanted to feel good about himself. He really did. But facts kept getting in the way. “It wasn’t enough, though. You still –” The words caught in his throat. He cleared it and tried again. “You still tried to kill yourself.”

Dave put his hand back on Blaine’s wrist. It was a relief to feel it there again, anchoring Blaine to the moment. “That wasn’t your fault. And I know Kurt thought it was his fault, but it wasn’t, either. You know what it’s like to feel that desperate. It’s hard for anyone to get through.”

“You’re right. I know.” Blaine nodded, blinked back the threatening tears. “You know what’s weird?”

“What?”

“It’s nice to have someone who understands what it’s like, to feel that way. Even though I wish you never had – it’s nice, too.”

Dave smiled that beautiful, bittersweet smile that Blaine had come to know so well. “It is.”

Blaine leaned in, bringing his free hand to rest on Dave’s fingers. “But it’s also nice … It’s nice that it’s _you_. It’s been such a wonderful surprise, becoming your friend. Sometimes I think fate brought us together, Dave.”

“I like being your friend, too,” Dave said.

* * *

It was Country Bear Night again, but this time Blaine didn’t sit on the sidelines. He got up with Dave and took his place on the dance floor, making sure to keep toward the center of the human grid so that, no matter how many times the rows of dancers turned left, he’d never end up in the front of the row trying to lead a dance he didn’t know. He studied the steps with the concentration of a mathematician trying to prove the [Riemann hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis), and it was … amazing. He’d forgotten that feeling of losing yourself in something new, how it made all your worries slide from your awareness, sometimes never to return.

There was the Cowboy Charleston, the Canadian Stomp, the San Antonio Stroll. They all had such cute, homey names. “Please tell me there’s a [Red Solo Cup](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-r6oIisqCU) dance,” Blaine said to Dave when the steps of  the Bartender’s Stomp brought them close enough to each other to be heard over the music.

Dave’s face lit up with delight. “Of course there is. Next break, I’ll ask the DJ to play it.”

When it came on, Blaine couldn’t help smiling even though he tripped over his own feet the first few go-arounds. It brought back the kind of memories that Blaine didn’t have to fight: of the camaraderie in the McKinley choir room, of a sense of home he hadn’t felt in so long until tonight, here with friends and strangers on the dance floor.

And then the music changed. The lines scattered, drifting across the floor and reforming into couples. Dave held out his hand.

Blaine’s breath caught in surprise, but he took it. It felt strange, Dave’s palm against his. Not bad – bad was the opposite of how it felt – but foreign, like trying to write an essay in Spanish during your first semester of studying it. It was square and solid, not at all like Kurt’s: long and slim, slightly clumsy but also ethereal, always on the verge of slipping away.

They didn’t fight over who was going to lead or even discuss it. Dave held their joined hands out to the side and put the other hand on Blaine’s waist, then stepped to one side as Blaine followed. It was easy to follow Dave, to echo his movements, to disappear into his shadow. He was so tall, which shouldn’t have been a revelation but it was now that they were touching, now that they were trying to move as one body even though they obviously were not. He was a mountain to Kurt’s sequoia, and Blaine was just a pine cone on a slope, tiny and insignificant.

And it was wonderful – yes, _wonderful_ to be insignificant in the larger scheme of things, to understand that his problems wouldn’t change the course of history, that even his heartbreak was a trifle when measured against the scale of earth and time.

They danced the two-step and the polka and country swing, until by the end of the night Blaine was teetering on the fine edge between elation and exhaustion. But it wasn’t in that wild, maddening way he was familiar with – the one that made Blaine do impulsive things like sleep with a stranger or propose to a boy he wasn’t even dating.

No, there was an undercurrent of calm to this feeling, one that was never there when Blaine was out of control. He was like a ship anchored to the sea floor. He might bubble and bob, but he wasn’t going to stray from where he needed to be. He wondered if this was what normal people meant when they talked about being happy.

The music shifted to something slow. Dave gave Blaine a questioning look. Blaine nodded and fell into his arms. As they started to move again, he pressed his ear to Dave’s shoulder and let himself be held, safe and warm, as he listened to Dave’s heartbeat through layers of muscle and fabric.

It had been so long since Blaine had heard anyone’s heart but his own.

Dave was alive. And he might not have been – he’d come so terrifyingly close to not being alive – but here he was, heart beating, skin softened with sweat, quiet breaths on Blaine’s scalp.

And Blaine was alive, too. He might not have been, either. But here he was, in spite of everything. Even without Kurt to hold him up, Blaine was capable of breathing.

Of smiling.

Of holding someone and being held.

He wrapped his arms tighter around Dave’s shoulders, fell deeper into the music and Dave’s body.

The song eventually ended, the music shifting into a faster tempo. Dave loosened his hands from around Blaine’s waist, but Blaine didn’t let go. He looked up at Dave, thinking he would say something but forgetting what it was as soon as he saw Dave’s eyes, soft and a little confused, watching him.

“Hi,” Dave said.

“Hi,” Blaine echoed. Then, remembering, “I like being close to you.”

A small, surprised smile lit up Dave’s face. He wrapped his hands back around Blaine’s waist. “Me, too,” he said. “Me, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> The phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the United States is 1-800-273-8255. A list of international and state hotlines can be found at [suicide.org](http://www.suicide.org/suicide-hotlines.html).


End file.
